Dealmaker in Chief

On January 5th, Donald Trump, then the president elect of the United States, aimed an incriminating tweet at one of the world’s largest car manufacturers. “Toyota Motor said will build a new plant in Baja, Mexico, to build Corolla cars for U.S.,” he wrote, likely on his unsecured five-year-old Android phone. “NO WAY! Build plant in U.S. or pay big border tax.” It was an odd threat; the new plant was in Guanajuato, not Baja, and it shifted jobs from Canada, not the United States. Nevertheless, the company signaled conciliation. “Toyota looks forward to collaborating with the Trump administration,” it announced as its share price plunged.

Since winning the presidential election in November, Trump has targeted more than a dozen companies with his one-hundred-forty-character broadsides, sending public-relations departments into overdrive and even prompting some tech firms to hire employees to monitor @RealDonaldTrump in the wee hours of the morning. When the president jawbones Boeing for a cheaper Air Force One or prods Chevrolet to move jobs back from Mexico, he claims to be strong-arming companies while boosting the economy as a whole—forcing executives to sacrifice profits for the sake of the American worker. Chief executives from companies like Ford and Sprint have struck a tone of civic duty, pledging to do their part to fulfill Trump’s economic promises, even if it will hurt the bottom line. But history suggests the opposite is true: corporations that strike deals with Trump stand to benefit at the expense of everyone else.

Throughout his campaign, Trump criticized the U.S. government for making “bad deals.” To him, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, NAFTA, the Iran nuclear deal, and the Paris climate agreement are all examples of inept negotiations carried out by career politicians in Washington. “I do deals. It’s what I do,” he told a crowd of supporters in October, pledging to fight for working-class Americans. Of course, the executive who builds a new plant in the Rust Belt expects something in return. When the manufacturer Carrier agreed in November to keep seven hundred and thirty jobs that had originally been slated to move to Mexico, the company won tax incentives and a vague promise of lighter regulations. Carrier’s tax break, $7 million over a decade, didn’t come close to recompensing the company for the $65 million it had hoped to save by sending jobs to Mexico. But other incentives were at play. Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies, can now rest assured that its government contracts, worth more than $5 billion a year, are safe from Trump’s whims. And though political goodwill can’t be tabulated on a balance sheet, Carrier’s executives can count themselves on the right side of Trump’s ledger of friends and enemies. “I was born at night but not last night,” United CEO Greg Hayes said after the deal. “I also know that about 10 percent of our revenue comes from the U.S. government.”

History has shown that direct interventions like these tend to produce corruption without broader economic gains. Researchers who study authoritarian regimes, where such tactics are common, say that targeting individual companies causes industries to focus less on innovating and more on currying favor. Pleasing the president becomes the fastest path to profits, and businesses race to take advantage. One study that looked at forty-eight countries over a period of thirty-five years, from 1950 to 1985, found that corporate profits tend to rise during a shift to autocracy. CIA-backed coups toppling foreign leaders throughout the mid-twentieth century provide the most dramatic examples of this phenomenon. For instance, after the 1973 coup that installed Augusto Pinochet as ruler of Chile, the country’s two major banking conglomerates, nicknamed “the piranhas” by international investors, grew at an unprecedented clip. As Pinochet enacted sweeping market reforms, the holding companies Vial and Cruzat-Larrain rapidly consolidated their grip on Chilean business, together controlling fully half of the total assets on Chile’s public stock exchange by 1978. It didn’t hurt that the two conglomerates maintained close ties with functionaries in Chile’s central bank and budget office. Meanwhile, the economy as a whole crumbled: As corporate profits boomed, inequality spiked and average wages fell, not to return to their 1970 levels until 1992.

For decades, presidents have largely respected what post-war business leaders called the “right to manage,” letting individual companies operate without direct interference. America’s last dealmaker in chief was Richard Nixon, who, like Trump, pursued an unabashedly transactional mode of politics where economic outcomes were subordinate to political ambitions. In May 1971, for example, Nixon found himself in need of funds for his upcoming re-election campaign. One of his targets was the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (I.T.T.), which was seeking to merge with Hartford Fire Insurance in what would be the largest corporate tie-up in memory. “Does I.T.T. have money?” Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman can be heard asking on Nixon’s secret tapes. “Oh God yes,” Nixon replied. “That’s part of this ball game.”

The I.T.T.-Hartford merger had already been flagged by Nixon’s justice department, which opposed the deal on the grounds that it would increase market concentration and allow I.T.T. to give its subsidiaries favorable insurance rates at the expense of consumers. But Nixon said he would force the department to drop its antitrust action if the company paid up. He told his aides to “cut a deal” with I.T.T. and leaned hard on Richard McLaren, a meddlesome antitrust regulator, to allow the merger. “If it’s not understood, McClaren’s ass is to be out of there within one hour,” Nixon said. “The I.T.T. thing—stay the hell out of it.” Two months later, the merger went ahead as I.T.T. quietly pledged $400,000 to the 1972 Republican National Convention.

After Nixon was impeached, Congress enacted a raft of rules to prevent Nixon-style horsetrading, including disclosure requirements that opened government meetings to the public. Corporate America, ever agile, responded by building a subtler system of cocktail hours, revolving-door hires, and the soft corruption of limitless political spending. Lobbyists regularly wine and dine congressional aides, who return the favor by running industry-friendly legislation up the flagpole. Successive rollbacks of political spending limits, Citizen’s United being the most famous, have allowed corporate interests to fund massive communications efforts pushing their agendas. That system has been effective at giving business a huge advantage. Researchers recently found, for instance, that Americans pay about twice what Germans do for cell-phone service because our telecommunications firms wield such extensive market power and political connections.

Many economists worry that Trump could preside over a fundamental realignment of government-business relations and usher in an era of naked corruption. Matthew Mitchell of the Mercatus Center explained that when leaders direct punishment toward selective companies, “You’re really just inviting firms to ingratiate themselves to policy makers.” Take antitrust regulation, an area of policy where candidate Trump made occasional anti-monopoly rumblings. So far, Trump has only expressed concern over monopolies that involve his political enemies. He has condemned Amazon, whose chief executive Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, and opposed the merger of AT&T and Time Warner, which owns the cable-news network CNN. Analysts have mused that Trump may make the deal contingent on Time Warner dropping CNN.

The message is clear: show loyalty to Trump and reap the rewards. That may explain why markets have stayed strong even while the media gives Trump credit for “bodyslamming big companies,” as one Post columnist put it. Corporations know that the president’s demands are publicity stunts that will be accompanied by tax cuts, deregulation, and direct access to the levers of government. Wall Street has tried to persuade the public that those policies will accelerate economic growth. But a University of Chicago survey of prominent academics found that while 62 percent agreed that Trump’s policies would increase corporate profits, only 16 percent predicted quicker economic growth that would benefit the average American. Daron Acemoglu, an economic historian at MIT who took part in the survey, condensed his thoughts into a tweet-length summary: “[Trump’s plans],” he wrote, “are much more likely to be disastrous for the economy.”

FEATURED ON HARPERS.ORG

Afew months before the United States invaded Iraq, in 2003, Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at the time, was asked on a radio show how long the war would take. “Five days or five weeks or five months,” he replied. “It certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.” When George W. Bush departed the White House more than five years later, there were nearly 136,000 US soldiers stationed in the country.

The number of troops has fallen since then, but Bush’s successors have failed to withdraw the United States from the region. Barack Obama campaigned on ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to send hundreds of troops into Syria. For years Donald Trump described America’s efforts in Afghanistan as “a waste” and said that soldiers were being led “to slaughter,” but in 2017 he announced that he would deploy as many as 4,000 more troops to the country. “Decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk of the Oval Office,” he explained. Every president, it seems, eventually learns to embrace our perpetual war.

With the Trump Administration’s attacks on affordable health care, immigration, environmental regulation, and civil rights now in full swing, criticism of America’s military engagements has all but disappeared from the national conversation. Why hasn’t the United States been able—or willing—to end these conflicts? Who has benefited from them? Is victory still possible—and, if so, is it anywhere in sight?

In March, Harper’s Magazine convened a panel of former soldiers at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. The participants, almost all of whom saw combat in Iraq or Afghanistan, were asked to reflect on the country’s involvement in the Middle East. This Forum is based on that panel, which was held before an audience of cadets and officers, and on a private discussion that followed.

Before he died, my father reminded me that when I was four and he asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said I wanted to be a writer. Of course, what I meant by “writer” then was a writer of Superman comics. In part I was infatuated with the practically invulnerable Man of Steel, his blue eyes and his spit curl. I wanted both to be him and to marry him—to be his Robin, so to speak. But more importantly, I wanted to write his story, the adventures of the man who fought for truth, justice, and the American Way—if only I could figure out what the fuck the American Way was.

Sarah was four years old when her spirit guide first appeared. One day, she woke up from a nap and saw him there beside her bed. He was short, with longish curly hair, like a cherub made of light. She couldn’t see his feet. They played a board game—she remembers pushing the pieces around—and then he melted away.

After that, he came and went like any child’s imaginary friend. Sarah often sensed his presence when strange things happened—when forces of light and darkness took shape in the air around her or when photographs rippled as though shimmering in the heat. Sometimes Sarah had thoughts in her head that she knew were not her own. She would say things that upset her parents. “Cut it out,” her mother would warn. “This is what they put people in psychiatric hospitals for.”

In the fall of 1969, I was a freelance journalist working out of a small, cheap office I had rented on the eighth floor of the National Press Building in downtown Washington. A few doors down was a young Ralph Nader, also a loner, whose exposé of the safety failures in American automobiles had changed the industry. There was nothing in those days quite like a quick lunch at the downstairs coffee shop with Ralph. Once, he grabbed a spoonful of my tuna-fish salad, flattened it out on a plate, and pointed out small pieces of paper and even tinier pieces of mouse shit in it. He was marvelous, if a bit hard to digest.

The tip came on Wednesday, October 22. The caller was Geoffrey Cowan, a young lawyer new to town who had worked on the ­McCarthy campaign and had been writing critically about the Vietnam War for the Village Voice. There was a story he wanted me to know about. The Army, he told me, was in the process of court-martialing a GI at Fort Benning, in Georgia, for the killing of seventy-five civilians in South Vietnam. Cowan did not have to spell out why such a story, if true, was important, but he refused to discuss the source for his information.

The family was informed they would be moving to a place called Montana. Jaber Abdullah had never heard of it, but a Google search revealed that it was mountainous. Up to that point, he and his wife, Heba, had thought they’d be moving from Turkey to Newark, New Jersey. The prospect of crime there concerned Heba, as she and Jaber had two young sons: Jan, a petulant two-year-old, and Ivan, a newborn.

Montanasounded like the countryside. That, Heba thought, could be good. She’d grown up in Damascus, Syria, where jasmine hung from the walls and people sold dates in the great markets. These days, you checked the sky for mortar rounds like you checked for rain, but she still had little desire to move to the United States. Basel, Jaber’s brother, a twenty-two-year-old with a cool, quiet demeanor, merely shrugged.

Illustration (detail) by Danijel Žeželj

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"Gun owners have long been the hypochondriacs of American politics. Over the past twenty years, the gun-rights movement has won just about every battle it has fought; states have passed at least a hundred laws loosening gun restrictions since President Obama took office. Yet the National Rifle Association has continued to insist that government confiscation of privately owned firearms is nigh. The NRA’s alarmism helped maintain an active membership, but the strategy was risky: sooner or later, gun guys might have realized that they’d been had. Then came the shootings at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, followed swiftly by the nightmare the NRA had been promising for decades: a dedicated push at every level of government for new gun laws. The gun-rights movement was now that most insufferable of species: a hypochondriac taken suddenly, seriously ill."